transferred the drama of reproduction to a new stage with new actors.
Therewith the immense emphasis placed on excretion, and the inevitable
reaction that emphasis aroused, both alike disappear. The sexual
protagonists are no longer at the surface but within the most secret
recesses of the organism, and they appear to science under the name of
Hormones or Internal Secretions, always at work within and never
themselves condescending to appear at all. Those products of the sexual
glands which in both sexes are cast out of the body, and at an immature
stage of knowledge appeared to be excretions, are of primary reproductive
importance, but, as regards the sexual constitution of the individual,
they are of far less importance than the internal secretions of these very
same glands. It is, however, by no means only the specifically sexual
glands which thus exert a sexual influence within the organism. Other
glands in the brain, the throat, and the abdomen,--such as the thyroid and
the adrenals,--are also elaborating fermentative secretions to throw into
the system. Their mutual play is so elaborate that it is only beginning
to be understood. Some internal secretions stimulate, others inhibit, and
the same secretions may under different conditions do either. This fact is
the source of many degrees and varieties of energy and formative power in
the organism. Taken altogether, the internal secretions are the forces
which build up the man's and woman's distinctively sexual constitution:
the special disposition and growth of hair, the relative development of
breasts and pelvis, the characteristic differences in motor activity, the
varying emotional desires and needs. It is in the complex play of these
secretions that we now seek the explanation of all the peculiarities of
sexual constitution, imperfect or one-sided physical and psychic
development, the various approximations of the male to female bodily and
emotional disposition, of the female to the male, all the numerous
gradations that occur, naturally as we now see, between the complete man
and the complete woman.